NYC; In a Gallery of Faces, the Names Come to Life

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: September 8, 2006

IN three days, the muted roll call will rustle across Lower Manhattan once more: names, so many names, enough names for a lifetime. They will stretch from Gordon M. Aamoth Jr. to Igor Zukelman, with 2,747 others in between. You may not recognize the names. But you know the people. You know who they were.

Names transcend death. In some faiths, a name captures the soul. It is why children, whatever their parents' beliefs, are often given the names of loved ones who are no more.

In some places, a name can be not a blessing but a hazard. A dispatch from Iraq this week told of people changing their names to keep from being identified instantly as Sunnis or Shiites and thus made possible victims in the sectarian bloodletting there.

Here in New York, names can cause bitterness. Witness the continuing conflicts over how names of the dead should be arranged at the memorial we are promised will rise some day at the World Trade Center site.

Should they be placed randomly, these names? Alphabetically? By location? By the companies where they worked? If so, how can we ever know that somebody who died on Sept. 11 would have wished to be identified through eternity by the office where he had a desk?

However the disputes are resolved, faces of the victims do not seem destined for the memorial. Faces can be even more powerful than names.

Indelible proof lies in the missing-persons fliers that were posted all over town, beginning in the first hours after the planes hit the twin towers. Have you seen this man with a circle tattoo on his upper right arm? Do you know the whereabouts of this woman who had long, thick eyelashes and large blue eyes?

These were not questions so much as prayers.

Thousands of fliers defined the city streets those early days of the horror. Many were plastered on walls and on lampposts outside St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan, in Greenwich Village. The hospital was a logical place for the hopeful to go. It had a trauma unit, and it was relatively close to the trade center. More than 800 people turned to it for emergency treatment that Sept. 11.

Their numbers, however, did not include the faces that graced the fliers.

In time, the sheets of paper came down. St. Vincent's officials gathered them. They placed hundreds of sheets side by side, at random, and covered them with plexiglass. The result was a tableau that stretched 25 feet or more under a portico on the hospital's West 11th Street side.

The Wall of Hope and Remembrance, it was called. People passed by, and looked. Some placed flowers or little flags or hand-written notes.

Larry Harris, a playwright who lives in the Village, was one of the many transfixed by those faces on the wall.

''There was a woman -- I saw her face, and it haunted me,'' he recalled. Like other New Yorkers, he felt he had to do something in the wake of the disaster. He wrote a short play, called ''Totems of the Fall,'' in which some of the faces returned briefly to life. Mr. Harris considered this one way ''we could get to know what we lost.''

Eventually, the wall, too, became a casualty. It endured for more than four years. But the fliers, though covered, began to deteriorate. Then a storm last winter ripped apart the protective layer. ''Unfortunately, it just got to be a disaster under that plexiglass,'' said Sister Kevin Phillips, a senior vice president at St. Vincent's. Reluctantly, she said, the hospital took down the wall.

But no one was happy about it, not the people who worked at St. Vincent's, not some of those who lived nearby. Mr. Harris, for one, said he ''felt the sense of loss all over again, as I do whenever I come upon the distorted skyline of Lower Manhattan.''

The wall, however, will be back, Sister Kevin promised. It was originally not meant to last long. ''The permanence of it came later on, when we realized it had great significance to people,'' she said yesterday. Copies of the fliers were saved, and will form a new tableau that is supposed to be better protected against the elements.

So faces will once again blend with names.

On that wall, Eric Steen will forever look happy. Fitzroy St. Rose will always wear a tuxedo. Harry Ramos will look jaunty in his white turtleneck. Colleen Supinski, she of the long, thick eyelashes and large blue eyes, will give a smile that dazzles.

And there, the family of Moises Rivas will say that it still ''wants him to come home.''